Текст книги "The Last Hour of Gann"

Автор книги: R. Lee Smith

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Текущая страница: 21 (всего у книги 80 страниц)

It didn’t matter, she decided as she started for the tangled clot of trees that grew around the stream. She’d be close enough to shout if something did happen and nothing was going to happen. She didn’t want anyone to see her naked anyway. She didn’t even like to see that.

The walk felt a lot longer than it was. Her feet crunched over dead thorns in the grass and stumbled over rocks. The wind blew her hair in her eyes and her hair stank. She felt awful, but she couldn’t decide if it was feeling sick or hurt or just ugly. She took her boots off down by the water and walked out into the cold mud and looked down at her reflection in the slow-moving stream. She couldn’t see herself at first, just Bo Peep after a bad night.

She got undressed and didn’t look at herself again.

The water was very cold, but it wasn’t freezing. She lost the feeling in her feet pretty quick, which was something of a relief, but the cold water and the wind started her shivering, and once she started, she couldn’t stop. She couldn’t bear to wade in any deeper, so she splashed and rubbed as best she could, wishing she had soap, knowing it wasn’t enough. Crouching awkwardly over the stream, she dunked her hair and rinsed until it stopped smelling like smoke and sweat, and smelled like smoke and sweat and wet hair instead. Eventually she gave up and waded out to get dressed. She still stank, but she’d done her best, so okay, what came next?

She dipped her old shirt in the stream and started to wring it out, then gave up and just tossed it on the bank on top of her pants. There was no point in cleaning them…or pretending to clean them, seeing as she had no soap. She wasn’t going to drag her dirty laundry around with her if she didn’t have to. She put on a clean pair of underwear. The elastic was going; she hitched it up over her hips twice, but it kept sagging. Nothing she could do about it. Nothing lasted forever.

“So suck it up,” she told herself. “Amber Bierce, fearless Space Adventurer, can live with loose underwear.”

Which was great, because sooner or later, she was going to have to live without it, too.

Never mind. Don’t think about it. Worry about today. Worry about walking a million miles in the rain gasping like a beached whale. Worry about Meoraq being too disgusted at the end of the day to look at you. Worry about Nicci.

Amber opened her duffel bag and pulled out her last fresh pair of pants. She put them on, at first only seeing how blindingly white they were, and then noticing with a start that they were big on her. Not quite to the falling-off stage, but not just loose either. She was actually going to need a belt soon and where the hell was she going to find one?

Uneasily, she put on her shirt. It was the same size as the one that had been so stiff and tight over her belly the day she’d gone into the Sleeper, she knew it was. And it was still stiff; the excess fabric stuck out on either side of her like wings, flapping loudly in the wind.

“Big deal,” said Amber, pulling at the front to make the reassuring roundness of her stomach stand out. “It’s not like you didn’t have it to lose, little girl. If it comes to that, you could stand to lose some more.”

But not a lot more.

“Everybody’s losing weight,” she reminded herself.

But not like this.

“You’re not starving, for God’s sake!” she snapped. “Nobody is starving!”

And this was true, thanks to Meoraq. So far, he’d put a dead saoq on Scott’s fire practically every single day, not that Amber had ever been invited to share it. Her meals came from Meoraq’s own portion and although she tried to be grateful, it was all the grossest bits: gut-kebobs, or worse, gut-stew, made from liver, heart, lungs, and who knew what else, along with whatever scraps she could peel off a roasted head. She tried not to be presumptive about it and she’d never asked for it right out loud, but when that head went over the coals, Amber Bierce knew she’d be chewing on a tongue in a few hours while Scott and his happy Manifestors got all the good parts. But she wasn’t starving, nobody was starving, and if she was showing it more than the others, it was only because she had more to lose.

Never mind. She didn’t need to worry about how her clothes fit or how much weight she (or Nicci) was going to lose before they figured out how to feed themselves. She had to think about today and how the hell she was going to survive that fucking hike. Meoraq was right; she needed to stop holding on to the stuff that couldn’t save her life.

Amber dragged her duffel bag over to a rock and sat down to rummage through it. The first book she pulled out was the one on gardening. It wasn’t the heaviest, and she knew that if Scott knew she had it—or any of these books, for that matter—he’d turn her wanting to leave it behind as an act of colonial treason. She didn’t really want to leave it either, but she also knew that just being from Earth didn’t make it holy. It wasn’t any good for gardening, not here. All the advice it had for her was about testing the pH balance of the soil or how to use the power tillers and set up the irrigation network. What was the point of knowing the optimum climate and humidity range for growing tomatoes or that planting cucumbers with radishes made them both grow healthier when she was never going to see tomatoes, radishes or cucumbers ever again?

So she tossed it and after that, it was easy to toss the rest of them: Canning Made Easy, Fundamental Agriculture, A Beginner’s Sewing Pattern Book, the Manifestor’s five-year planner and their even less-informative guidebook to planet Plymouth. Once she’d tossed them into the bushes and kicked some leaves over them, she’d halved the weight of her duffel bag, easy. And she could stop there if she wanted. She didn’t have to give up anything else. Maybe they couldn’t save her life, but they weren’t heavy. She could keep them.

“Oh suck it up,” said Amber, but she didn’t sound tough at all. She sounded like a fat chick in flappy clothes, hugging on to a pair of fucking coffee cups.

She brought them out and held them, staring until rainbows and kittens and sunflowers and letters all blurred together. They were just things, like the books. They couldn’t help her. They weren’t sacred. They were just things.

The only things she had left from that whole life. Two lousy coffee cups.

* * *

Meoraq counted them three times before he convinced himself that, yes, he’d lost a human. The very morning after he’d told them all to be ready to move out at sunrise, one of them had wandered off. Well, the sun was up, and he’d had time enough to wake every still-sleeping human and make them take their camp down and herd them all together and then count them three damned times, and he was of a mind to leave anyway and let that be a lesson to the rest of them. But he counted a fourth time, just to be sure, and on that fourth count, he realized just who was missing.

Meoraq stopped mid-stride and rubbed hard at his brow-ridges, counting his breaths. A slow-count of six and then another, and when he was calm, he opened his eyes and walked back to Scott, standing close to Nicci. “If you sent her out of my camp again, I’ll kill you.”

Scott’s flat face showed him no obvious alarm. “Miss Bierce?” he called. “Can someone find Miss Bierce? I have no idea what this th…what he’s saying.”

“He’s looking for Amber,” said Nicci. “She’ll be back soon.”

“Back? Where did she go?” Meoraq demanded. A thought struck him. “Did she take her spear? O my Father, restrain my hand. If she’s gone hunting—”

“She hasn’t.”

“No one interrupts a Sheulek!” Meoraq snapped, then paused and looked down at Nicci again. “You know where she is?”

Nicci cowered and Scott stepped forward to take her against his side. The man started to speak; Meoraq shoved him away and took Nicci by the chin, leaning in aggressively close.

“Answer me at once,” he ordered. “Where is she?”

“Down by the water, I think,” she whispered, trembling in his grip. “I don’t know. She…She left without me.”

He released her with a grunt of disgust and started away, snapping, “Stay here and be ready to travel on my return,” over his shoulder as he went.

“Hey!”

Meoraq stopped and looked up at the sky. “Why?” he said, conversationally.

“Because I want to talk to you!” Scott answered, coming to face off against him.

“I was not speaking to you.” Meoraq rubbed at his brow-ridges again, then folded his arms in a warning any dumaq would understand. “But since you’re here, what do you want?”

“I want you to understand that in my camp, it is not acceptable for you to get physical with us.”

Meoraq felt his spines shifting slowly forward and back again. “Go on.”

“I am in charge of these people,” said Scott, oblivious. “I’m responsible for their safety. And while I appreciate your efforts in acting as our guide—”

Meoraq tipped back his head and began another slow-count of six.

“—I am not going to tolerate all this hostility!”

Meoraq opened his eyes and leaned close. “I am going to give you the opportunity to amend those words,” he said mildly. “Because I think even you know that I have not yet been nearly as hostile as I could be.”

“Um…” Scott’s fur-striped forehead wrinkled with something that might have been uncertainty. He glanced behind him at his watching people. “Did, ah, did anyone catch that? Nichole?”

Meoraq gripped his brow-ridges again and this time hissed a little. “Father, I beg You to let me kill just one of them,” he said, then dropped his hand and bellowed, “Stay here!” right in the human’s flat, ugly face.

Scott let out a reedy shriek and threw himself backward, tripping over his own boots and falling on his backside.

“And be quiet!” spat Meoraq and stalked off. This time, he was not followed.

By the water, Nicci had said, and the humans had left a trail broad enough to lead him there even after only a single night. He had almost reached the greenbelt when Amber came out of it, carrying her pack over her shoulder. She’d changed her clothes; her clean ones were so white and loose they made her look like a candle-ward, which almost made him smile even as annoyed as he was. And if she had looked even the least bit repentant, he might have let her apologize and come back with him and have it all over and forgotten. Instead, she saw him and scowled.

So be it.

“Where have you been?” he demanded, advancing on her with two fingers pointed right at her throat. “I told you when I wanted to leave and you run off alone? No, do not dare open that mouth! I gave you an order and unlike the rest of your idiot kind, you understood it! You…” His spines flicked upright. His pointing hand lowered somewhat. “What’s wrong with your eyes?”

She swiped her sleeve across them at once and pushed past him on her way up the trail. “Nothing!”

He caught her by the arm and swung her around, peering closely at her face. Her eyes were indeed swollen and red, as if she’d been sitting in smoke.

“Are you hurt?” he asked, concerned.

“I took a bath!” she snapped, yanking against his grip. “Is that all right with you? Jesus!”

“A bath,” he said, keeping an easy hold on her despite her struggles. “This is the second time you have forced me to chase you down and you know how pressing time is! A bath? Where do you think you are, human?”

“I stank.”

“I don’t care! I care that you disobeyed my spoken will and ran off on your own when all the rest of your herd is waiting on my word to move on! You—”

“I’m hungry, Meoraq!” she shouted. “I’m cold! I’m tired and I’m hurt and I’m…scared…” Some of the fire faded from her eyes. She rubbed at them and backed away, keeping her gaze averted and her arm stiff in his grip. “And I stank. And I thought I could do something about the smell. But I still stink. So…So do what you’re going to do and then leave me alone.”

The wind gusted, sweeping dead leaves out of the trees and over their feet. Meoraq watched them blow away in eddies. He did not release her.

“You are not to leave my camp alone,” he said at last. “Take N’ki with you if you must go. And tell me when you do. I want to know where you are.”

She laughed—a shrill, humorless sound. “I don’t even know where I am.”

“Damn it, stop arguing with me! If you don’t give me your obedience right now, you’ll never bathe again!”

She put her free hand up and covered her eyes. Her body was very stiff. Her breaths were short and shallow…and shook.

She was crying.

‘Oh, well done, Uyane,’ he thought, and looked up at the sky. He let go of her. “Go,” he said gruffly. “I am going to fill my flasks and once I have done that, we are moving whether your people are prepared or not.”

She turned her back on him at once and walked away, her head bent and both hands gripping the strap of her shoulder-pack. Meoraq watched her pick her way through the trees until he couldn’t see her anymore. He scratched at the side of his snout, sighed, and started walking down to the water. The first thing he saw coming out of the bracken was the damp heap of her old clothing lying on the bank. Strange that she hadn’t bothered to keep them. They were filthy and not new, but they still had some good days of wear left in them to his eye.

‘Perhaps she didn’t think she had time to wash them,’ he thought to himself, hunkering down to prod at them. ‘And seeing as you came down to whip her back to camp like wandering cattle, perhaps she was right to think so.’

If they weren’t lying in the mud like this, he could take them himself, but he didn’t have a spare satchel to put them in and didn’t want to get everything he owned wet and dirty. He felt a little sorry that Amber had managed to get her feelings bruised, but she could have taken her bath last night and washed her clothes then so they’d be dry and she ready to march this morning. She had instead made the choice to wait and he refused to help her feel like more of a victim because of it. She had other clothes, clearly.

He straightened up, turned around, gave the two colorful objects perched atop the stone an idle glance, started walking, and then halted and looked back at them. Amber’s bootprints, the only ones fresh enough to hold a little water at the heels, made a clear trail from the water to the stone and onward to the trail. She had to have been sitting there, right where the objects now sat, which meant she’d put them there. She hadn’t dropped them by the bank, as with her discarded clothing, and she hadn’t thrown them into the bushes. She’d set them down carefully. And she’d left crying.

Meoraq rubbed at his brow-ridges and scratched the side of his snout. He glanced at the trail, which was still clear for now, and then turned away from it with a sigh and went to see what the hell he’d bullied her into giving up.

He realized what they were after just a few steps. It startled him at first, although he didn’t know why it should, really. They wore boots and slept in tents; why shouldn’t they drink from cups?

“Fuck,” muttered Meoraq, picking one up. Two cups, each with single handles sized for human hands and narrow bowls to accommodate human mouths. They were made of fired clay, or something similar, garishly painted and glazed to a high shine, and as ugly as they were, to judge by their symmetry and the craftsmanship of their nonsensical coloring, they had to be tremendously expensive. He had never seen her drinking from them. She’d been saving them. Perhaps treasuring them. And now she was leaving them.

Meoraq sighed, then unbuckled his travel-harness and slid out from under his pack. “This is not my doing,” he announced. “If she wants to crawl off and run water out of her eyes over a pair of cups, that is entirely her decision. I would have let her bring the damned things.”

I will not carry sentiment.

“She didn’t even ask me.”

Why can’t just one of you do what you’re told without whining at me?

“Fuck,” Meoraq said again, wrapping the cups, one in his spare tunic and the other in his spare breeches, and shoving them down deep in his pack. He felt thoroughly disgusted—with himself, with Amber, with the whole of Gann. Cocking an eye at the rolling face of Sheul’s heavens, he said, “Tell me just one thing, my Father, I beg. Is there ever a right answer?”

Sheul listened, but said nothing.

Meoraq filled his damned flasks and sat down on the stone, kicking dourly at Amber’s bootprints until he’d rubbed out all he could reach. He did not hurry back to start the day’s march. When Amber looked back to see if she was clear of him and free to do the rest of her crying, he wanted her to think she was alone. He wasn’t completely insensitive.

3

So followed several days of travel and, with compromise on both sides (Meoraq took a savage pleasure in this, that he was able to compromise with these creatures rather than beat them into obedience, and if that wasn’t proof of his humility and therefore his worthiness to enter Xi’Matezh, nothing was), they forged a tolerable routine. Meoraq allowed the humans to wake in their own time and to eat whatever was left of the previous night’s meal. Then they walked, scattered widely after their habit while Meoraq prowled around them, trying to take point, foot and both flanks along their careless line. They made frequent stops for resting, but managed, he thought, at least three spans each day and that was acceptable. Toward evening, they made their camp and Meoraq hunted. Thus far, Sheul had rewarded his efforts at herding human cattle with fair game and sweet water, gifts he acknowledged each night in his meditations and which the humans seemed to think was only their due.

After three days, they finally came out of the muddy lowlands and began the long, slow trek across the stony fields of middle Yroq. Tempting as it might have been to find a road and lead the humans across it as far east as could be managed, Meoraq forged his own path. There weren’t many roads and there were always eyes upon them; worse than the risk of encountering messengers or merchants or even a Sheulek about his circuit, a caravan of near fifty moving bodies would certainly attract whatever raiders were about. Better by far to keep to the wildlands, keep moving, and keep quiet.

But the first day in the plains was even slower than it had been when the humans insisted on carrying their machines with them. The ground was marginally more level, but riddled with broken rock and thorny overgrowth that made passage difficult even for an experienced Sheulek. The humans tripped and staggered like children just learning to walk, tearing their soft flesh and bruising their soft bodies with shocking ease. When he finally called for camp and took inspection of them, he found himself amazed only that no one had managed to break a bone yet. How he was going to get them over the mountains into Gedai loomed in his mind, more and more of an impossibility the longer he pondered it, but he would just have to trust that Sheul would provide the means when the time came. There were problems enough for him to solve right now.

His hunt that night turned up no meat, but plenty of good wild gruu. He gathered up an armload and took it back to soften in the coals, and once he’d taught the humans how to get it out of its leathery peel, they seemed to find the taste agreeable enough to squabble over. They ate like animals, barking and chuffing through mouthfuls of food, reaching across one another, picking at their teeth with the flimsy claw-like protrusions that tipped their fingers. From what he could see, they didn’t even wash their hands—not before falling on their meal and not afterwards. He left them to fight over the peels and made a lengthy patrol, stopping once to fill his flasks and bathe at a small ground-spring, and once again at a stony ridge to watch the sun set through the clouds and pray.

He did not return to camp until well after dark and he returned troubled. He had heard the calls of tachuqis behind the wind and seen the blood-stained and trampled grass that marked the site of one of their recent kills. He could only hope it was recent enough that they would not be actively hunting tonight, because a pack of ungainly, unarmed humans would be a damned easy hunt indeed and Meoraq needed to sleep.

Most of the humans were huddled around the fire he had set for them—at least they hadn’t let it go out this time—and the rest had bedded down already. A few nodded to him, their bobbing heads an unpleasant reminder of the tachuqis who were perhaps nearby, and Scott rather grudgingly raised his hand in some sort of human salute, but that was all. His time with them had taught him well not to expect better tribute than that.

“And why should they pay it?” he muttered, unbinding his tent and assembling the first of his poles. “Who am I but the man who protects and provides for them in their most desperate days? Lazy, useless, machine-worshipping pests.” Meoraq snorted, sending a scathing glance back over his shoulder, only to find Amber almost immediately behind him.

“Hey,” she said and offered him a somewhat mangled-looking hunk of gruu.

He looked at it, then at the starved and half-chilled human who had saved it out for him. The hand of Sheul was heavy upon his shoulder. He grunted and began to put another pole together. “Eat it.”

Her hand slowly lowered, melting out of the air like the grimace melting off her malleable face. She turned around.

Damn it.

“Sit down.” Meoraq kicked the rumpled roll of his tent into a kind of mat and took his own offer, indicating a place beside him and realizing only afterwards that he’d done it with the back of his hand—an intimate gesture—and not the two-finger point that would have been proper for a Sheulek dealing with subordinates, civilians, cattle, and surely humans.

She hesitated, frowning over her shoulder at him.

He said it again, speaking slowly in case it was his language and not his complete lack of tact that held her at bay, gruffly adding, “Eat with me.”

“You don’t have anything.”

He grunted and dug into his pack for his cuuvash, showing it to her before snapping off a square and putting it away again.

She sat down. The tent was still folded and not quite long enough to accommodate them both, especially as he’d dropped himself in the middle of it. Her shoulder bumped his as she settled; he heard the faint slap of her hair on his scales whenever the wind caught it; he felt the warmth emanating from her body all along his side. He thought he should probably move over and give her more room. He didn’t.

“See anything out there tonight?” she asked.

“There is always something to see.” He tore off the first bite of cuuvash and softened it, watching her jaws work as she ate her roasted root. The thought that he had provided the gruu that fed her did not annoy him the way it did to think of feeding the other humans. Instead, it made him wish he’d brought more. He brooded on this, his spines low, while he ate.

“I heard some weird sounds,” said Amber.

He grunted, inviting elaboration.

“A kind of…ooo-wah ooo-wah!”

He was more fascinated by the cupping of her hands around her mouth than the noise she made by doing so. It took a moment or two to regain focus, another moment to make sense of the clumsy human sounds, and yet another few moments to think about what it meant. “When was this?”

She hesitated again, then took an obvious guess at his meaning. “Not right here, but pretty close. I went out to look, but I didn’t see anything.”

“Not where—” he began, and stopped to frown at her. “You went out to look? Alone?”

She only looked at him.

He poked her. “You,” he said and made walking fingers. “Went out.” He moved that hand away from his body. “Alone.” And glared at her. “Against my command.”

Her brows dropped in an infuriating human scowl. “I had my spear!”

“Would you like to be burned with it, you senseless little calf?”

“Would I what?”

“You stay here!” he told her, thumping two fingers down (on his tent, but he would not notice this until later). “You do not leave the sight of this camp for any reason and you do not go even one pace away alone! Swear it to me!”

She frowned, but it was not incomprehension that made her do so, only stubborn human defiance. “Why?”

“Because I said so!” he snapped.

“I can take care of myself.”

His spines slapped flat. He stood. “Get up.”

She took that for an order to leave him and started angrily away, so that he was forced to catch her arm and pull her bodily back to him. He turned her around, held her firmly until she stopped trying to shake him off, then released her and said, “I am a tachuqi. A lone tachuqi. One only man-height, with no beak or talons, ha! I am just such a lamed and feeble enemy and you have come this close to me. Take up your spear.”

She looked around, as if thinking it would present itself, then closed her hands hesitantly around empty air and bent her knees in a clumsy warrior’s stance. She eyed him with suspicion and uncertainty in equal parts and then lunged for him.

He kicked as a tachuqi kicks, leaping up and driving his leg outward, even sweeping his foot downward in the slashing motion that would disembowel if he had the beast’s killing talon. She tried to dodge—she also finished her lunge, stabbing her imaginary spear into his side as her dying act in a move that he knew his training masters would roar with delight to see even as they beat her for her suicidal stupidity—but his boot caught her fully on the chest and knocked her hard to the ground. He bent, his hand hooked to make a tachuqi beak, and gripped her firmly by the throat. “You are dead,” he told her. “Get up.”

She did, but wary now. Her hands flexed upon a new nonexistent spear. She braced herself, mud on her chest in the shape of his boot-print, and lunged again.

He leapt back as a tachuqi leaps, arms spread in imitation of their defensive posture, and kicked her in the back as she went by. She staggered, swinging as she fell so that her spear again found its target, and ended on the ground with his hand on her throat. “You are dead,” he said again, letting go. “Get up.”

She did, breathing hard—too hard, she was too new to this, too underfed, too small and weak, too human—as she pulled a spear from the air and readied it against him.

This time, she charged, dropping to her knees and stabbing upwards in a move that was, however ultimately futile, worthy of an admiring grunt as he, the tachuqi, darted nimbly aside and tore out the back of her neck in a single bite. “You are dead,” he told her, pinning her face briefly against the ground. “Get up.”

She didn’t, not right away, but when she finally got her arms up and her feet under her, she was arming herself invisibly yet again.

“Survival in the wildlands is not a matter of persistence,” he said, ignoring her to sit down again on his mat. “Only knowledge, strength and skill. You have none of these things. Stay within your camp, human. I am with you and Sheul’s eye is upon us both.” He picked up his cuuvash and broke off another bite, pretending not to watch her.

She glared at him, weaving slightly on her feet with her empty hands still locked around an invisible spear. She was tired enough, bruised enough, muddied enough, that he thought she might give in despite the look in her eyes.

But this was Amber.

She dove at him.

He was not a tachuqi any longer. He caught her up upon the heel of his hand, her feet flying out before her with the force of her aborted momentum, and down she went upon her back much more gently than she would have gone were he an honest enemy. He held her there, waiting as she gasped herself calm, aware that every human in the camp was awake and watching them. A little water collected at the corner of one eye, just one, and it did not replenish itself once it fell. She did not cry surrender.

Meoraq moved his hand from her breastbone to her elbow and helped her to sit up. She wouldn’t look him in the eye, but she took a piece of cuuvash when he offered it and put it in her mouth. She chewed, staring fixedly at the ground.

Gradually, the other humans settled themselves, although some continued to watch them. Scott was one of these. Nicci, he noticed, was not.

“Can you teach me that?” Amber asked at last, still avoiding his eye.

Meoraq snorted. “Yes. Come to me as soon as you can present the signet of your father’s House, proving you are a son born to the warrior’s caste and we shall begin the seventeen years of training. Don’t talk at me like an idiot. We don’t have time to waste in foolishness.”

Her mouthparts pressed together into a flat, pale line. Her lower jaw trembled.

He waited until he was certain she had accepted her defeat and then said, firmly, “You will stay in sight of this camp always. You will not go even one step beyond its borders alone. Give me your obedience.”

She looked up and directly at him with eyes that were too bright and too green. “No.”

He stared at her, knowing his spines were fully extended and surprise etched in every scale of him for all the world to see. “What did you just say?”

“I said, no.”

“You did not!” he said inanely.

“Want to hear it again, lizardman? No. And you don’t get to argue with me about it.”

“You forbid me?” That was a killing offense, and yet he was not in the least angry. Stunned, yes, but the first emotion that bled in when shock finally faded was still not anger, only amusement. “If you have something else to say before I bind and muzzle you, I suggest you come to it quickly.”

“That’s exactly what you’re going to have to do,” she told him. “Look, you’re already sick to death of us. You aren’t going to stick around one minute longer than you have to. When we get to wherever it is you’re taking us, you’ll leave.”

He opened his mouth to tell her this was not necessarily so, but closed it again with that unspoken because the alternatives so obviously included killing them and he would rather not have that possibility between them just yet. And it would be a lie in any event to say that leaving the humans behind was not a pleasant thought. She surely knew it and he would not insult her by pretending otherwise.